Immanuel Baptist Church has been serving Little Rock, Arkansas for 125 years, recently converting a former Kroger grocery store adjacent to Immanuel Baptist’s sanctuary City Center into an 800-capacity community venue that includes classrooms and clinics.
Regional AVL integration firm Paragon 360 designed and installed a complete AVL system for the venue, using Danley Sound Labs sound reinforcement in a challenging acoustic space.
The Paragon 360 team of Rich Nelms, Mark Coble and Brian Roggow led the design, management, installation, and commissioning of City Center’s AVL system. ‘The main venue at is meant to be modular and flexible to accommodate everything from youth concerts and church services to conferences, public talks and parties,’ Nelms explains. ‘The stage can be removed, and seating can be placed around tables or in rows or removed entirely. Air walls allow the larger space to become two or three smaller spaces. The footprint is large, and the minimum SPL requirements had to meet concert-level volumes.’
To deal with the reflective walls, the team installed a FabriTrak system of tracks that are filled with acoustically absorbent material and covered over with fabric. However, there was nothing they could do about the low ceiling height. ‘We certainly couldn’t put a line array in there,’ Coble says. ‘In addition, they have a giant LED wall, and no one wanted it to be aesthetically compromised by bulky loudspeakers. We needed all of the pattern control we could get from relatively small, point-source boxes. We considered several of Danley’s loudspeakers to find the perfect fit, and SH50s with DFA down fills were our choice to give us great pattern control and coverage in a small package that would be easy to keep out of sight.’
The stage is set against the longer dimension of the room and four SH50s – each with a DFA down fill attachment – run its length. The DFA is an asymmetrical high-mid horn designed to integrate with the SH50. It delivers 50° vertical coverage but 50° to 100° horizontal coverage, front to back, respectively. When the room is divided into three spaces, the larger middle space gets two of the SH50+DFAs, and the rooms that flank it each get one. A pair of flown Danley DBH218 subwoofers capably round out the low end, especially for high SPL events, and a single SH95HO hangs below them to provide centre fill.
Two four-channel Danley DNA 10k4 Pro and one four-channel DNA 5k4c amplifier/DSPs power the system. Roggow used the DNA onboard DSP and presets as starting points when he commissioned the system, tweaking them to match the characteristics of the room. A QSC Q-Sys Core 110 with touch panel controls provides larger system-level routing control, input conditioning, and presets.
An Allen & Heath dLive s5000 digital console runs the show, with an Allen & Heath ME-1 personal monitoring system for musicians and presenters on stage. A full complement of wired microphones together with Shure wireless microphones and in-ear monitors round out the system.
After running several events at City Center, Immanuel Baptist Church is satisfied with the quality, impact, and intelligibility of the new system.
